


Crocus

by Whreflections



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Animal Abuse, Cannibalism, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2016-12-25
Packaged: 2018-09-12 01:13:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9049330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whreflections/pseuds/Whreflections
Summary: The zombie virus spreads, peaks, and begins to settle into an unknown that may dwindle or linger.  In his house in Wolf Trap, Will looks after his dogs in stasis, until he meets a young man in the snow.  Written for Hannigram Holiday Exchange 2016





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [clicktrack_heart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/clicktrack_heart/gifts).



> aljs;dkf 
> 
> at this point I am too nervous and eeep (and also sleeeep, hahaha) for words other than I really hope you enjoy this and I'm so sorry it's not longer. This hasn't been the best month personally for writing but I still wish I'd been able to get my thoughts into cohesion sooner and have more of this for you like I planned :/ 
> 
> BUT I will also say- since my original plan was to have two oneshots for you as gifts, I reallyreally do still want to do a spacedogs masquerade for you as a after Christmas present, so hopefully I can work on that soon <3 
> 
> ANYWAY, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!!! 
> 
> EDIT 5/18- Dear Lord there were dozens of typos in this that massively sleepy me did not catch when I first posted it x.x I'm so, so sorry for everyone who's read this in the past, but they're all fixed now lol

When they met, it was winter.  February or March, an amorphous inbetween—the months had already long begun to run together.  Will turned the pages of the same calendar largely out of stubborn habit, an off tempo marker trailing behind the cover of the new moon.  It was the second winter past the rising, the first he’d faced where no matter which direction he choose, he found no gas to commandeer for even a little generator use.  Nothing abandoned to siphon that hadn’t already been siphoned, no tanks, no surprises that weren’t cosmetic—missing letters in the ‘Twizzlers, 2 for $2’ sign, rotting tires, the bones of what looked to have been a black bear scattered across an intersection. 

He’d realized then, standing next to an old pump with a cord long since chewed through, that this piece of his life might be another segment filed away already.  Next year, the walks might not even be worth the potential gain, the loss of daylight for chopping wood.  After all, in a sense time had become his most precious resource, stretched and divided, used and wasted and all too often feeling folded in on itself, bunched into something he wouldn’t have recognized before. 

Even his walks in the woods had morphed to always have purpose, a gun or fishing rod slung across his shoulder, his eyes as much on the undergrowth and the horizon as the dog he’d chosen to take out with him for the day. 

The particular curl of Ranger’s tail at the scent of death had become as familiar as the kick of his rifle in his hands, the clamor and rattle of his nerves against his veins when the dead got close enough to batter their ineffective fingers against his back, his arms, the cuffs of his jeans. 

They weren’t the kind of death Ranger smelt on this winter afternoon; Will knew.   The gnawing hole their presence brought to his chest, that had become familiar, too. 

In the snow near his feet, around the rounded jut of what must have been a fibia or a tibia at best guess, the crocuses wilted.  The truth of what lay before him eluded Will more than once, too slippery to hold.  It had been some time since he needed words like those, or words at all.  Further up the bank, hair spilled out from behind a lovingly wrapped mask of cloth, obstructing the face that had once gone with the cracked open ribs beneath it, clean of meat recently enough there was still a hint of glisten. 

On the other side of what had once been the fire, the eyes of an uncovered face bored into him, smooth as glass.  The scream was lower, in his throat, behind his own hidden ribs he’d have taken out if he could form her again from them, new and whole and tugging on his hands as his life became hers.  Will could feel the edges of that scream, worn smooth by the work of the boy's throat in turning it over and over, the ghost of its weight settling in Will’s own throat despite his efforts to swallow against it. 

Ranger skidded to a stop against Will’s legs, the expansion of each panted breath knocking the cage of the clumsy hound’s ribs against his knee.  For a moment, there was no room for sound beyond how thoroughly he filled the silence. 

Even from his current distance, Will could tell easily half of the blood on the boy’s hands was his own, his knuckles split. 

Will reached to take off his coat, flinched half a second after the boy across the firepit did, like an echo through muscle and bone. 

“I didn’t— If I hadn’t—I couldn’t let them—“

Will squeezes hard as he drapes his coat around hunched shoulders cutting him off. 

“I know.  I know.” 

*****

For six months, the nightmares came as silent as his days, though life with Hannibal was anything but quiet.  There was, first, the sound of his footfalls on the floor until he learned where it creaked, the uncertain way the dogs shuffled around him until they, too, learned the cadence of his steps.  The clink of a second fork on the plates at dinner, the thud of a second glass.  The odd, old feeling of being able to close his eyes and hear someone that wasn’t himself moving around in his kitchen, lighting a fire, making trout pop and sizzle. 

In this world that had changed around them all overnight, how could it be any more strange that he’d learned Hannibal’s name from a note written on the margins of a yellowed newspaper than it was that they were both alive?

Nothing was stranger than that. 

The seat on the couch sagged with Hannibal’s weight, then Winston’s.  Will’s eyes opened at the hard, cool edge of a plate against his arm, a glimpse of Hannibal’s smile the first thing he sees, slightly blackened toast the second.  It was hard to make it even, over the fire.  He wouldn’t have known that pained Hannibal if not for the meticulous way he tried to scrap the dark bits out of the crust, curving and snipping with the knife Will sometimes used to gut his fish. 

The slightly different sweetness of honeysuckle twanged against his tongue from inside a jam that was mostly wild honey already, the only source of sugar they had left to access without a long run into town.  The hum low in his throat was intentional, as soft and deep as if it wasn’t.  The words, less so.  When he started talking on reflex around Hannibal, he couldn’t be sure. 

“The taste, it reminds me of Louisiana.  There was a row of bushes down at the end of the dock and we’d…I must have gone down there almost every day in the summer that first year.  Got a couple ants on my tongue for my trouble.” 

“It was her favorite, too.” 

There was no heart in him to say that it wasn’t his favorite, not even close.  He missed peach preserves, blackberry jam, the chill of eggnog with the heat of bourbon.  Jarring, to realize the sound of a voice with an accent he can’t place could sound sweeter still. 

Without looking at him, Will took another bite. 

*****

At the end of the world, choices grow narrow, like the stretch down to a black hole.  In the dark, Will could remind himself of that as he closed his eyes and saw Hannibal, the stretches of skin so pale when he’d found him last year turned gold from the sun.  It was November, or it wasn’t; he was half sure he’d missed a couple moons in his distraction.  The man his mind half the time called a boy had made a garden out of Will’s disorganized plot of earth, and they’d tended it well through to the harvest. 

The losses they’d suffered when a  pack of stragglers came through and trampled the cabbages hadn’t been worth moaning over, not when they’d all made it safe into the house, Will and Hannibal staring at each other in the dark upstairs, Will’s hand clamped tight around Buster’s muzzle so he wouldn’t whine.  Hannibal’s ankle had pressed against his where their legs stretched out , meeting in the middle.  The arch of his neck when he craned it to look out the window without getting up and waking Ranger asleep on his thigh had seemed downright classical, a sculpture of old reformed in a cruder medium than such grace was made to inhabit. 

Hard not to think of him as a boy when he could have been one of Will’s students under different circumstances; impossible not to think of him as a man when it was clear he was.  Early 20’s, a college kid who ceased to be a child the moment he abandoned classes to head to Baltimore and find his sister. 

In the back of his mind, he could feel the earliest threads of what would become Hannibal as he knows him tickling at the base of his nerves, teasing and hinting.  Perhaps, _child_ wouldn’t have suited him even three years ago at 19.  In her absence, it was impossible to parse out what Mischa had taken and what she hadn’t, which pieces of the glass in Hannibal’s eyes when he tilted his head at the corpse they found frozen into the pond would have been there without her specter to drive them into place. 

The closer to that black hole he slipped, the further the distance between his bed and Hannibal’s spot on the couch seemed.  With his eyes adjusted to the 4 AM dark, Will could see the line of his spine, the slight definition of it down the back of his sweater like a ridge.  With no fire it wasn’t hard to chill his skin with the air between them, to pull the blankets back from his chest and further and breathe until the cold sapped the heat from him, until the hand curled fist tight against his hip unfurled. 

*****

It would be easier, to say there was no name for the glint he caught in Hannibal’s eyes looking down at the crumpled pile of rag and bone at his feet.  Easier, and false—he had lived in eyes like those, half a dozen times.  More, maybe; the distance he had on the life he'd lived before made it harder to count.  With Hannibal, there was no sustained beetle black glimmer, just an unsettling shift in gravity that came and went in the beat of a moth’s wing. 

By the time the cloud of breath he’d puffed out rose past the point of his disheveled hair, he’d become Hannibal again, though something sharp lingered behind the molten warmth of his eyes when they met Will’s.  Rather than drop the wrench he held, his hand flexed on it, like a warrior testing the heft of his blade. 

“He’d have skinned him if I hadn’t been faster.  I think we’ll have to take the leg.” 

Pressed against the back of Hannibal’s ankles, Buster trembled, blood leaking into the snow from the deep would to his back leg. 

His pool was dwarfed by the saturation to the front, the unidentifiable mass above the still defined lines of broad shoulders.  This man was larger than Hannibal, likely older.  The knife resting weirdly askew in the underbrush attested to the certainty that he’d been armed, and yet there Hannibal stood, barely winded, a little creature far more helpless sheltering at his feet like a cricket beneath the maw of a wolf. 

Putting his hand to the back of Hannibal’s neck burned, as any act of tempering would.  Later, in a dream filled with a skeleton that became antlers that pushed through skin until he crawled through the world on a dozen tines, he would be sure he could feel his palm bubble with the heat when his mouth pressed to Hannibal’s temple. 

In the moment, there was only the soft rasp of fabric as Hannibal dropped the wrench to grip his coat, the breath exhaled from both of them that mingled and settled, taking the scream worn thin as a worry stone right along with it. 

 


End file.
